Indentured Students

For decades, government-backed student loans, like home mortgages, helped define the American dream, enabling ambitious teens to pay for college in exchange for a career of higher earnings. Now, the $1 trillion in outstanding student loans has become a nightmare, imprisoning students in a lifetime of debt. Bloomberg reporters John Hechinger and Janet Lorin, in a year-long series of articles, exposed abuses in higher-education finance. Their reporting contributed to new federal rules on debt collection, the introduction of several Congressional bills, and reforms by the colleges themselves. It shed light on a long-unaccountable sector in the American economy: higher education.

Marco Rubio, the son of a bartender and the first in his family to go to college, just finished repaying more than $125,000 in student-loan debt from the University of Florida and the University of Miami law school.

The U.S. Education Department must step up its oversight of private student-loan debt collectors, improving the tracking of borrower complaints and changing its commission system to reward customer service, a report found.

Students who take out loans from private lenders to finance their education should have the same right to discharge their debt in bankruptcy that other borrowers enjoy, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin said today.